Note 194 — Chapter XIII

The discoverer of unsequestered property belonging to ‘delinquents’ received 1s. in the £. By the warrant of county committees, the property of any who had rendered the slightest service to the royal cause was liable to be sequestered, For instance, John Browne, a gentleman owning estates in Herefordshire, being a minor and left destitute of the means of subsistence, was “forced to seek out his guardian and go into the king’s quarters, whereby he became a delinquent.” He did, indeed, bear arms as a Royalist, but atoned for this by serving afterwards for three years in the Parliament’s army. Petitioning on that account to be admitted to compound for his estate, he was still fined a-tenth of his property. A Lancashire husbandman, for simply supplying a cheese to the soldiers at a Royalist rendezvous, (where he was summoned on pain of death by Lord Derby’s officers), had his property sequestered, though he ever after lived in the Parliament’s quarters, submitted to their committees, and took the covenant. Members of these committees were often paid the debts owing to them by Parliament out of delinquents’ estates. “God of His mercy grant,” says a journal of the time, “that for the future, it may never see a perpetuity added to the two Houses of Parliament; nor committees to manage the justice of the kingdom and sit judges of men’s liberties, estates, and fortunes, admitting not the law for their rule, but their own arbitrary, revocable, disputable orders and ordinances.” It was said, indeed, that if a man had a single enemy on a committee, it was impossible to obtain justice, for ‘against malice there was no fence.’—Military Mem. of Col. Birch, 63, 96, 219, 236; Sir Roger Twysden’s Journal, quoted in Bisset, Omitted Chapter of English History.